Category: GQ
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From Shakespeare to Steven Spielberg, the actor his peers agree is the greatest of his generation is breaking character and stepping off the stage to lend his gifts to two Hollywood blockbusters (and playing Thomas Cromwell in the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which has won two Bafta awards). When GQ met theatre’s…
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Nobody could tell me the dead man’s name. It was a little after nine on an oven-hot late January morning in the district of Combattants in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic.
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The life of a war correspondent has never been cheaper. Travel, equipment… even the pay cheque is lighter. But the rules of engagement are different in today’s street-level combat zones, where the press corps’ blue flak jacket offers little protection against conflicts and more journalists than ever are paying the ultimate price for the scoop.
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Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Junior enters his sitting room, dressed as Tom Wolfe. It’s mid-September in New York City and hot out. Wolfe, who is 81 years old and lean as a racing greyhound, is wearing a chalk-white linen suit and a cerulean-blue shirt, a white pocket handkerchief with navy trim, leather spectator spat boots in…
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The murder of a black teenager by a gang of white youths in 1993 was the case that sickened a nation, exposed the racism at the heart of a British institution and shaped the future of the legal system. But it took nearly 20 years and a tiny speck of forensic evidence to bring the…
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When the first call came, Anshul Gupta was dead to the world. It was 7.50am on Tuesday 2 February, 2010. Normally, Gupta would have been showered and suited by this time. He was, and is, a wealthy man with a senior position in a multinational coal-mining firm, and he did not ascend India’s corporate ladder…
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It’s not an image I remember best from the match, but a sound. At seemingly incongruous moments in the fifth set of last year’s first round tie between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, the crowd on Court 18 at the All England Club emitted a nervous, collective giggle. Wimbledon crowds don’t usually giggle. Of course,…
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Far removed from the Kenya of beach resorts and safaris, the Dadaab refugee camps on the country’s border with Somalia are home to 300,000 people displaced by its volatile neighbour’s civil war. For Islamic terrorist group al-Shabaab, the camp’s children are easy targets for recruitment. Is this supposedly safe haven the breeding ground for the…
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On a bitter, bright September morning in 2006, I stood with my translator on the gravel outside Chita airport, in Siberia, considering my options. We were in a fix. Having already flown seven hours from Moscow on a Kruschev-era rustbucket, we were still half a day’s journey from our destination. Siberia is that kind of…
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Before he discovered his mistress was talkative, before Claridge’s lost a Michelin star, before a debt crisis threatened to scuttle his business, before he breached the covenants on a 10.5million pound loan, before he was halfway lynched for abusing an Australian television presenter, before the smudges in his official biography were exposed, before the critical…